


Mimic

by levitatethis



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Reality, Angst, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-18
Updated: 2010-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:14:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levitatethis/pseuds/levitatethis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unexpected turn of events and an unanticipated agreement among adversaries brings great consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mimic

“_And I fight back in my mind. Never lets me be right.   
I got memories. I got shit so much it don’t show.”   
_-**Pearl Jam, **_**I Got ID   
**_  
“You’ll have to excuse my skepticism, but it’s not every day that the man who ordered my torture and execution—to death and back, repeatedly—comes begging for my help.”

“I’m not begging for anything,” Bennet says folding his arms folded authoritatively across his chest.

“I say you are,” Sylar says twisting a smirk up at the right corner of his mouth.

A brief standoff ensues before Bennet lets out a frustrated sigh. “Fine. Now if you agree—,”

“Say it.”

Confusion wrinkles across Bennet’s brow with a series of creased lines, one on top of the other. “What?”

“Say it,” Sylar says playing mercilessly with him. He enjoys the mental torture he knows he is inflicting.

Bennet’s steely eyes express disgust at such an admission but he has agreed to far worse before. He settles for a drawn out swallowing of his pride. “I’m begging for your help,” he forces the repulsive sentiment from his mouth.

“I do like the sound of that,” Sylar says and holds Bennet in a deeply predatory gaze. “So these escapees…”

“Are the most dangerous ability enhanced people The Company knew about and tried to contain in Level Five,” Bennet says. “Had you not _died_ you would have been placed with them.”

“Considering what you did to me I can’t fault them for wanting to get out,” Sylar notes. “And coming after you.”

Bennet firmly sets his jaw and Sylar’s belittling admonishment continues.

“Finally, all that bad behaviour catches up with you…and your family,” Sylar says with the inflection of a condescending jeer. “Karma’s a bitch ain’t she?”

Choosing to ignore Sylar’s goading Bennet says, “They were implanted with tracking devices. They all found the obvious one—upper shoulder—but not the experimental one in their brains.”

“So you can still track them,” Sylar completes the statement.

“But with your array of powers—all under your control—you’re the only one strong enough to stop them,” Bennet says again.

A small smile softens Sylar’s face at the flattery while also making him appear frighteningly aware of his own unmatched prowess. “And I would do this because?”

Bennet hesitates. “For each one you kill you can take their ability for yourself. I won’t stop you.”

“As if you could,” Sylar says. “You know, this is low even for you Bennet. Sanctioning mass murder and rewarding me for it.”

“My family is the most important thing in the world to me. I will protect them at any and all costs,” Bennet says ignoring Sylar’s demeaning countenance. “I don’t care for or expect to lend value to other’s opinions on how I do it.”

“And what stops me from killing Claire myself?” Sylar asks the question that has been ignored and avoided so far.

“I believe we can find a compromising arrangement,” Bennet says. “One that should work in both our favours. Their powers are far greater than some of the more juvenile ones you’ve taken. But to get to them you’ll have to do what I say. That means Claire is off limits.”

Sylar’s thoughtful expression gives way to a subtly maniacal grin. “Ah the smell of weakness in the air. I hate its stench and the taint of its taste. But in others it’s just so appetizing.”

“Then you’ll do this?”

“I’d be mad not to.”

 

************ ********** ********** ********** ********** **

 

“Are you absolutely insane, Bennet? He’s a serial killer and you’re asking him to not only kill but become stronger and possibly unstoppable in the process?!”

“The rules have changed, Suresh. Adjustments have had to be made,” Bennet says coldly into the phone.

“And what about after they’re all killed—saying Sylar does manage to take them all out—how will you stop him?” Mohinder says, wrapped up in an onslaught of insistent panic. “What will prevent him from turning on you? On everyone?”

Silence crackles the distance over the phone line.

“I can’t worry about that right now,” Bennet says. “I’ll deal with it but I need to protect my family first. I’ll figure it out.”

“Figure it out?” Mohinder says under his breath then raises his voice. “This is…I can’t be part of this. I won’t.”

“I know.”

“What? You know? What does that—Bennet?”

“Your expertise is no longer required, Doctor Suresh.”

“Wait. Don’t do this!”

“My work has gone in a new direction and you no longer offer the knowledge or grasp of what needs to be done.”

“I swear if you—,”

“Goodbye.”

Mohinder stares at the phone in his hand. The dial tone taunts him in the lonely quiet.

 

************ ********** ********** ********** ********** **

 

They move in parallel lines.

One chases the path of the other, visible on the periphery, in step but out of sync. Cat and mouse, there was a time when their positions were reversed, when Sylar sought Mohinder out. Now Mohinder plays catch up, tag he is it, and he stumbles forward while trying to keep Sylar in his sights.

From the sidelines Bennet ignores Mohinder’s pleas. From within the middle of his own catastrophic game Bennet’s dismissal is a reality that burns Mohinder after being strung along by him once before with badly detailed plans. This time Mohinder can see it play out with other participants and much higher stakes. Ignorance would be bliss.

Sylar casts amused glances over his shoulder once in awhile when the pursuit of his chase explodes endorphins throughout his body. Being tracked is as much a rush as tracking.

Mohinder feels cast aside and stood up. Sylar feels recharged and envied.

Some killings are quick but the level of enemy combatants Sylar deals with require expertise of his multitasking abilities. He comes to appreciate the challenge of the murders as each one force him to a new level of brilliance that has gone previously untested. For awhile he can ignore that he is working _with _Bennet, a man he despises, while protecting his daughter Claire who has a power he has coveted almost from the beginning, before all of _this_ came to pass. But he never forgets it. It is the golden egg at the end of it all.

A handful of times Mohinder almost catches up but distractions of another stolen and scientifically manipulated virus as well as finding himself as a continued target for Company spying throw up roadblocks all around. Adding in the list to find and help more enhanced persons and a handful of pissed off Specials who refuse to differentiate between him and The Company and there are times when Mohinder finds the first waking breath in the morning to be too much.

Sylar’s selfish motivations are relatively clear-cut. His drive is mostly self-explanatory though he enjoys the opportunity to profess his own greatness when he gets the chance. Little, if anything, labours his steps. His mind is free of past restraints as he focuses an unwavering gaze on the road before him. Sweeping henceforth he is a smooth beast who does not wish to destroy the world but make it his playground. Cleaning up and collecting, he is servant to no one.

Mohinder’s reasons used to be understandable. But he has had to make so many changes just to survive that compromises have begat compromises and where he is now sits a far cry from where he was. He dislikes himself for it, for every decision that hurts his heart and aches his brain. But survival, he tells himself, requires adaptability, flexibility that can be as much mental as physical.

The longer Mohinder chases the madness under the guise of rational logic, the more deeply Sylar believes his own evolutionary purpose under god; the more they both complete the other’s steps. Their faces melt into one, shapes into shapes.

Their distinctions become indistinguishable.

 

************ ********** ********** ********** ********** **

 

“You’re nothing more than a hired thug,” Mohinder says. “You’re an errand boy doing Bennet’s dirty work to make up for his own mistakes. You’re helping keep the blood trail from being traced back to his doorstep…and he was the one who yielded the weapons. What a good little boy you turned out to be.”

“Jealousy doesn’t become you,” Sylar says taking pleasure in the intensity that is typical of one of their confrontations. “But it does give you a kind of anxious desperation that’s quite…endearing.”

“Why would I possibly be jealous—,”

“How did you find me? How did you get up here?”

“What—,”

Mohinder only gets the one word out before Sylar crosses the room in an unperceivable breakneck speed, eliciting a gasp of surprise from Mohinder. Sylar peers his darkening eyes steadily, his derisive judgment slams into Mohinder as he wrenches Mohinder’s right arm forward and telekinetically pushes the sleeve of his shirt up his arm.

“You’re quite the hypocrite, Mohinder,” Sylar says in a harsh whisper as he tilts his head downward, half looking at Mohinder’s arm and half glancing up at Mohinder’s nervous and shifty eyes. “Curing people, pretending to help them manage their abilities—actually encouraging them to _deny_ it—to be _normal_. But the needle marks tell another story.”

Mohinder tries to pull free of Sylar’s grip but the assaulting fingers only dig in deeper.

“You’re resourceful, Mohinder, and smart, but not enough to have caught up to me and gotten in here without _special_ help,” Sylar says in full lecture mode. “I told you, normalcy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. All those samples of greatness just sitting around waiting for a little experimental cocktail to fuse them into one injectable drug.”

“I did what I had to do to stop you,” Mohinder attempts to argue but Sylar shushes him dismissively.

“And yet here I still am. Don’t play the fool. You did what you’ve been wanting to since we met,” Sylar says in contradiction. “You tried to become me, to feel the power of being so much more than a wannabe living through other peoples brilliance.

Sylar pulls Mohinder closer against him and whispers in his ear, “Your blood runs through my veins Mohinder. It seems only fitting that mine should now run through yours. I always knew we were cut from the same cloth.”

Mohinder takes a collective breath and yanks his arm free then pushes Sylar away, harder than his usual strength would normally allow, forcing him stumbling back on his feet. “I’m nothing like you. I didn’t do this under some pretense of being a god amongst humans. I didn’t do this to see what pain I could inflict on others. Stopping you, stopping others like you…you talk about how only the strong survive—my ability to create this _enhancement drug_—to use it—is my fight for survival.”

“Like I said, resourceful,” Sylar grins. “I like that.”

“Sylar.”

“But I can’t have you stopping me. I’m far too close to finishing this job and claiming my grand prize.”

“Do you honestly believe you’ll get anywhere near Claire Bennet now?” Mohinder says angrily, disbelieving Sylar can be this obtuse.

“Honesty has nothing to do with it,” Sylar says and disappears into thin air leaving Mohinder wide-eyed and flustered.

 

************ ********** ********** ********** ********** **

 

It is an unexceptional room in an inconspicuous building on a random block of a too busy city. Mohinder sits on the side of the bed and gently pushes Peter’s hair back from his face revealing broken eyes that are red and raw and staring up at nothing.

“Peter, it’s not your fault,” Mohinder softly says, his own brown eyes a well of despair at his friend’s state and the maddening events that have brought them here.

Peter’s eyes shift his way, latching on to his while remaining disconnected, trapped within plaguing thoughts. “I should have stopped him. I should have been stronger.”

A tear slips from the corner of Peter’s left eye and slides slowly down the side of his face.

“Peter.”

“He did it right in front of me,” Peter says with a flat breaking voice. “I was useless.”

“You’re alive,” Mohinder says rushing the words, but the plea in his voice is as despondent as he feels.

“So that he can remind me I’m nothing,” Peter mutters and his eyes move blankly to the ceiling.

Letting out a troubled sigh Mohinder, still cupping a soothing hand to the top of Peter’s head, looks over his shoulder to the door. Nathan; thought to be dead by all after his assassination but actually in hiding ever since, returns the melancholy gaze. Mohinder slowly stands up and walks over, his anger brewing.

“What do I do?” Nathan asks trying to retain the appearance of being calmly together. His tired eyes with deep set lines pressed into his skin from the weight of piling worry however betray the act.

“I don’t know,” Mohinder says and he immediately hates the inadequacy of such a response. “This is Bennet’s fault. I told him not to…but he never listens and now this…”

“Bennet didn’t have to ask Peter to do it,” Nathan says flatly. “Peter would have done it anyway.”

“But Bennet set the events into motion and ignored all the consequences,” Mohinder says. He feels like his own heated emotions are a culmination of what Peter and Nathan are too broken to show. “Bennet should have dealt with the outcome instead of sending Peter in to clean up the mess! He didn’t care that Peter might be at a disadvantage…as long as he had time to get away with—,”

Mohinder catches himself before the name is spilled forward. Nathan closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, folding his arms across his chest. When he opens his eyes Mohinder sees a coldness seeping in. It worries him but he is thankful enough for anything besides despair.

“Adam’s immortality is the only thing that saved Peter—besides Sylar’s torture kink in sparing his life,” Nathan says briefly grasping Mohinder’s shoulder with his right hand. “He’s in no shape to go after him again and Sylar is far too strong.”

Paranoid thoughts clamour for control of Mohinder’s brain. There are so many things he could—_should_—have done differently but did not. The consequences are as much his to shoulder. He looks at Peter’s listless body in the bed and is nearly undone by the shattered soul that limps below.

“Claire,” Peter sobs quietly and closes his eyes.

 

************ ********** ********** ********** **********   
**

Mohinder stares at the half filled syringe in his hands. It has been two months since he last injected himself and three days since seeing Peter. Tapping his right foot on the floor he shifts his weight on the bed, sitting on the edge. A cool breeze brushes across his back from the open window behind him but it does nothing to relieve the stifling atmosphere of the apartment.

Void of life the apartment stings of the deadened silence last felt when Mohinder first set foot in it on the heels of his dead father. Matt and Molly are long gone, making a new life twenty minutes away, although they may as well be in Canada. Mohinder’s relationship with them is strained and the disappointment he feels in himself for slipping out of Molly’s life disgusts him for repeating a cycle his father started with him.

He tries not to let his mistakes hinder his actions or tumbling thoughts. He used to think about the past a lot, tried to learn from it, but it did not stop his world from imploding. Now he buries the past; imagining that the day will come when he will be able to unpack it again without suffocating regret.

To move forward he must detach himself. To halt a catastrophic future he must be more.

With resolve he steadies his hands.

 

************ ********** ********** ********** **********   
**

Sylar thinks he must be the closest thing to invincible. Not only is his physicality unmatched, a fact that sets his neurons into a sparking rampage of self-gratification, but mindfully bending people to his will, an intellectual chess match that he refuses to lose, drives him to push further ahead, to surpass where others have failed to tread.

He is self-sustaining. More than a head above mortal men he is the personification of absolute greatness. He reaps the spoils of war with no regrets and little afterthought. Breaking Peter was a joy, forcing him to watch Claire’s life ripped from her and her ability consumed with hungry and calculated eyes, was a pleasure. Leaving her crumpled body for Bennet, as a token of thanks for such a miscalculated venture of a partnership, was the icing on the cake.

Sylar no longer thinks in terms of ‘villains’ or ‘heroes’. The words are simplistic and childish, like ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

He prefers loaded words like ‘adversary’ and ‘nemesis’. They suggest a complexity of interaction and understanding. They revel in a spectrum of grays in which both sides exist within the same paradox.

On paper Peter should be that person to him. But who is a god but to meet his maker in a man. The paradox then is in the powered versus the unpowered. Reality thus makes his greatest adversary the least likely of persons.

Sylar once considered it a weakness to acknowledge another person’s strength. He wanted a stacked playing field. Now he sees honour in the challenge. There is respect in having to work hard to stay a step ahead. Sylar’s existence is in a perfectly balanced relationship to another.

There is meaning in that.

 

************ ********** ********** ********** **********   
**

“You always did over think things.”

Mohinder nearly drops the syringe and jumps up, spinning around to confront Sylar who is standing against his bedroom wall next to the open window. That voice still sends a shudder of familiarity and panic through Mohinder and he fights to keep himself in check.

“And to what do I owe this unwelcome visit?” Mohinder asks unable to completely hide the quiet shaking in his voice.

“It’s been awhile since we last talked,” Sylar says casually keeping a ready smile in place just for him.

“You missed me,” Mohinder says, taunting Sylar and gripping the syringe tighter.

“Always,” Sylar says accepting the tease of the challenge. He drifts his eyes down to the needle in Mohinder’s hand. “You really should just say no.”

Confusion flitters across Mohinder’s features at first and then he remembers what he was doing before Sylar showed up. A flush of embarrassment warms his skin and he drops his hands to his sides, letting the one with the needle rest just behind his lower back.

“Have you come to take inventory of what’s left?” Mohinder asks testily. “Have you returned to bask in your disgusting glory?”

“Please, Mohinder, you’re making me blush,” Sylar says.

Mohinder glares and Sylar continues. “It is interesting though—no matter how much I take you refuse to let me be. Even when you can see there is nothing that can be done. It would be admirable if it weren’t stubbornly bullheaded and self-destructive.”

“Someone has to stop you,” Mohinder says with conviction returning to his voice as he squares his shoulders and holds his head up high.

“I thought that’s what Peter was for?” Sylar says as a cruel joke.

Mohinder grimaces his displeasure at the distasteful comment. “How do you do it? How do you just destroy peoples lives without a care?” he says, demanding answers for all the inexplicable hurt Sylar has brought down on others.

Sylar does not answer but his eyes appear to grow darker and he peers at Mohinder through narrowed slits.

“Or maybe I should be asking _why_ you take pleasure in it?” Mohinder goes on.

“Because I was meant to,” Sylar says, his firm response reiterating his steadfast belief in himself. “Just like you were meant to always be two steps behind me, chasing me, learning from me.”

Another step forward and Sylar again eyes the hand Mohinder has hidden behind his back. “There was a time, Mohinder, when you came very close without that.”

“What—you don’t like me leveling the playing field?” Mohinder says and raises the syringe out in front of him. “Don’t like the idea of me catching up to you?”

A brief hesitation of seconds passes during which an unreadable expression crosses Sylar’s face and disappears. “There must be side effects,” Sylar begins questioningly.

“You hate that I’m breathing down your throat,” Mohinder says sidestepping Sylar’s curious concern.

Sylar’s eyes grip his with an unspoken challenge daring him to not look away. “Is that why you haven’t used it in months? Side effects?”

Mohinder’s eyes grow in surprise that Sylar is aware of when he last injected himself with the blend of Special blood. “It’s no concern of yours except that I’ll get you soon enough.”

After a few seconds of a tense standoff Sylar plasters a fake grin on his face. “Breathing down my neck is not the same as taking me down Mohinder.”

Sylar turns to the window and walks over. He rests his hands on the sill and pokes his head outside breathing in the crisp nighttime air and listening to the cacophony of sounds that penetrate the darkness. Standing up he looks at Mohinder who is watching him anxiously.

“But if you think you’re close, let’s see what you can do,” Sylar says testing the strength of his ability to manipulate the situation. He returns his gaze to the window.

Mohinder stares at Sylar’s back then down to the needle in his right hand. The resolve from earlier is cracked and doubt has settled into the fissures. Sylar’s mention of the past produces a flashback time machine that plays out in rapid succession across his mind. Mohinder does not know if he believes in that version of himself any more. Sylar is too powerful to take that risk. Mohinder presses the tip of the needle to his left arm, below the faded healing scar from months before.

“Mohinder.”

Abruptly stopped Mohinder looks up to find Sylar watching him with the faintest trace of concern. Sylar’s eyes fall to the needle that is still pressed to his arm then back up to Mohinder’s questioning eyes.

“A battle of wills does not have to be a power for power match up,” Sylar says cryptically. “You put up a better fight before.”

Staring at each other Sylar silently asks for comprehension of his multi-layered riddling words with wondering and demanding eyes that search Mohinder’s with shifty lack of certainty yet refuse to look away. The meaning is unclear yet understood.

_A true test of wills.   
_  
Sylar gives Mohinder one last look then turns to the window and disappears. Mohinder lets out the deep breath he did not know he was holding and stares down at the needle poking at his skin below, wanting to break through the cell barrier. Again he looks to the window then down to his arm.

Mohinder closes his eyes.


End file.
